First and second languages on the net

What language is the net written in? A wikipedia page on the question proposes the following charts. These charts are based on estimates as of May 2011, themselves not fully representative of the full net content - but let's have a look at them all the same.This one represents the languages used for the contents of the web:This one represents the language spoken by web usersDid you notice the discrepancy? English accounts for 57% of all contents - but only 27% of users. And in parallel, Chinese (I suppose this is Mandarin) accounts for 25% of users, but only 5% of contents.Traditionally, English has been the web's lingua franca. But non-English contents has grown at a rate much higher than English contents. And it looks like the future of the web will be multilingual. Also, let's not forget - if 55% of the web is written in English, 45% isn't, and that 45% represents a considerable amount of contents.I think the early days of the internet brought with them some utopian vision of a unified world - where everyone would communicate with everyone in the 'global village'. For non-native speakers of English - like myself - this meant an added burden of study: the doors to the global village were opened only to fluent English speakers. Others remained at the margin.Now, it looks like more diverse communities are blossoming. But how do these 'web-linguistic-subcultures' communicate? Are they equivalent in shape to the 'global' English-speaking community, simply different in size? Or is there a qualitative difference between them? Are they radically fragmented, provincial, each individually relating to the core 'English' web, but not to each other?In particular, what is the situation for 'second-tier' web languages - German, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, French? Debates about multilingualism often seem to jump directly to forgotten rare dialects, omitting to think - more cynically perhaps - about these second tier languages big enough to not be just lumped in an 'other' cloud, but not yet big enough to compete with dominant English. Partly, the Marco Polo Project was born of a felt need to create bridges between the Chinese and English webs - the first two languages by users, if not contents. But is there such a need?And finally, what does it mean that - still - a significant part of internet users are communicating in their second language - while others use their first? Does that create an implicit hierarchy - some sort of post-colonial position of dominance to native English speakers, who can put aside the burden of learning a foreign language, and still access the world? Or does it create a risk for 'English', which sees itself more and more invaded by non-native speakers, to the risk of possible depletion - reducing to some watered down 'globish'?At the start of this Education and Digital Culture MOOC, these are the questions I'm asking myself - and which I'd like to reflect on further over the next few weeks. I've just downloaded a big report by 'Net.Lang: "Towards the multilingual Cyberspace", and will post further reflections here. Meanwhile, all comments are very welcome!